


The Boy in the Basement

by NezumiPi



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Canonical Child Abuse, Child Abuse, Dehydration, Emotionally Disturbed Child, Gen, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Moral Dilemmas, Serious emotional disturbance, Suicidal Thoughts, Time Travel, timestream
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-12
Updated: 2020-07-21
Packaged: 2021-03-04 21:42:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 12,856
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25213351
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NezumiPi/pseuds/NezumiPi
Summary: Daniel Sousa, along with three other agents, investigates the Ward family home in 1996. He knows that time is fragile, that any drastic actions could permanently alter history.They sat in silence for nearly a minute. Sousa knew that he couldn’t promise anything. Grant was equally aware that he had offered the man sitting across from him the opportunity to differentiate himself from prior ineffective adults, and that Sousa had declined to do so.
Comments: 33
Kudos: 48





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> CW: Discussion of child abuse is extended and graphic. Abuse of children is committed by both adults and children in the course of the story. Suicide threats are included as well.

“There’s just one person inside. They’re in the basement, right size to be him.” Sousa wasn’t sure exactly what Phil Coulson was capable of seeing, if he had X-ray vision like in the comic books, or could just locate human shapes. But apparently, whatever it was, it could handle a suburban house, even an unusually large and fancy one, just fine. The garage could hold three cars (though only one bay was currently full), the walkways were paved with polished slate tiles, and the lawn had been manicured to within an inch of its life, every identical blade of grass cut with exacting precision.

Sousa was in Sudbury, Massachusetts with Phil Coulson, Daisy Johnson, and Yo-yo Rodriguez, leaving Simmons and May on the Zephyr to run searches. They had landed in a wealthy suburb in 1996, somehow following an evil space robot ship through time (Sousa wasn’t about to pretend he understood that part). They were at the childhood home of a future agent to determine if he had been replaced by a Chronicom and, if possible, to collect a blood sample for some complex science reason that Agent Simmons had attempted twice to explain before doing her absolute best not to sound patronizing when she said, “I want to…compare…patterns of…tiny chemicals in his body.”

Maybe because he was distracted by all the future tech, Sousa didn’t fully register his fellow agents’ unease with their target.

Coulson knocked politely on the front door, waited the requisite ninety seconds for some movement within, and proceeded to twist the knob so hard that the plunger barreled through the wooden door frame, shredding it along with a sizeable portion of the door itself.

“Oops,” he said with the slightest edge of a smile, the one that could represent a sincere mistake but could fit just as easily represent deliberate sabotage hiding behind misfiled paperwork.

“I could have picked that,” hissed Daisy.

“It was a regular household lock. We all could have picked that,” answered Sousa at a normal volume. There was no point in trying to be quiet now.

The foyer had a high ceiling with lights embedded in the dark green walls. There were no places for coats or shoes – the family obviously used this entrance for company only. Daisy was squinting at the left wall, where an off-center Mondrian print was hung a few feet above the ground. She tipped it to the side, uncovering a patch of white plaster, a few inches in diameter, that hadn’t been repainted to match the rest of the room. She looked at Coulson and pointed to her discovery. “Wall safe?”

“No,” Coulson shook his head, “just plaster.”

They passed from the foyer, through the dining room and kitchen, before finding the door to the basement. There was a basic padlock on it, holding together a cheap, hardware store latch.

“There’s a trick to these,” said Yo-yo, picking up a pen from kitchen countertop. “I liked to watch these videos on YouTube.” She continued disassembling the pen before glancing back at Sousa. “It’s like a movie theater in your home. And you get to choose the movies,” she explained. She then jammed the barrel of the pen into the space around the key mechanism, wiggled it slightly, and smiled in triumph as the lock popped open.

As soon as the basement door opened, they could smell it. The rest of the house was so relentlessly clean, the odor was pungent and impossible to ignore. Under normal conditions, Daisy was often the first through doors, since she had an actual superpower. And in his present state, Coulson was, while not indestructible, surprisingly hard to kill, so there was really no excuse for Sousa to open the basement door, but he did.

The basement wasn’t particularly dirty or damp when compared to basements in general, only when compared to the rest of the house. Frame boards ran along the ceiling among pipes and wires, punctuated by bare light bulbs with chain pulls every fifteen feet or so. “It smells like a men’s bathroom,” said Yo-yo, recoiling backward, but she forced herself to ignore the odor, breathe through her mouth, and turn on the first light. It was high-wattage, bright white light that gave the steps and the tiled floor a hospital-like sterile tinge. There were no windows, or they had all been blacked out – without the light bulb, it would have been pitch black. The bulb was strong enough that it lit up the far corner, the source of the smell: a dog crate, perhaps four feet by two by two, with a child inside. There was no food, no water, no bedding. The bars were bare on all sides. The boy could probably sit unimpeded, but he couldn’t lay down and stretch to his full height. Beyond the physical privation was the humiliation – being literally treated like an animal, forced to sleep in his own piss. The child looked sweaty and sallow, with sunken eyes and his mouth hanging open. There were scrapes on his hand that were still raw, though not dripping blood.

Sousa started forward, but Daisy caught his arm. “Wait,” she said, “we know him. That’s Grant Ward. He’s going to grow up to lead-“

Sousa shook off Daisy’s grip. “Is he a human?” He looked at Coulson for confirmation. “Is he a human being and not some alien robot made to look like he’s ten?”

“I’m twelve,” argued the boy. His voice was hoarse and soft.

Coulson walked over to the crate. “Let me see your hand.”

“Bite me.” It was clear Grant had meant this to be sharp, but he lacked the vigor.

There were small but distinct smears of blood on the bars and a bit on the floor to the left of the crate. Coulson rubbed his index finger against one and brought it to his nose. “He’s human,” said Coulson, “but the timeline-“

“The SHIELD I joined,” said Sousa, crossing the basement with determination, “would never tolerate locking a child in a cage. No matter when it is or who they grow up to be.”

While Sousa strode forward, Daisy put one finger on her nose. “Not it,” she said. “I’m not going to be the one to tell him about-“

“Me neither,” said Yo-yo.

Sousa picked up a hammer from the tool bench on the far wall and walked over to the cage. “Put your head down,” he said to the boy, miming with his own chin to his chest, “and cover your eyes with your hands.” As soon as the child complied, Sousa brought the hammer down on the lock that held the cage shut. It took three hits to break apart. With the lock removed, the boy could unwork the latch himself by sticking his fingers through the gaps. He crawled out of the cage painfully slowly, stretching cramped limbs and fighting against obvious dizziness.

“How long were you in there?” asked Sousa.

“Two days. Um,” he swayed slightly as he thought, “probably two and a half.”

Which explained half of the smell. A person couldn’t go two days without urinating. And dehydration would cause vomiting, which explain the other half. He had left his shoes behind in the crate, having taken them off and used them for a pillow. He was wearing blue jeans and a dark green polo shirt, both stained. Sousa was fairly certain he had never gone two days without food, and knew he had never gone two without water.

“Is this your house? You’ve got clothes here?”

The boy nodded. His head hung forward, mouth slightly open. He was shorter than all of them, so he looked up through narrowed, suspicious eyes.

“Why don’t you go change and wash up, and then we can talk?”

The boy started for the steps but turned around. “I want to know who you are.” His voice had a thin, croaking quality that was likely due to dehydration, but possibly the early stirrings of adolescence. He looked back at Sousa. “You said SHIELD, but that doesn’t make any sense. My dad says SHIELD is like the FBI for weird stuff.”

And then he was gone. They followed him up the basement stairs to the kitchen, but let him go to the second story alone.

“Who the hell is this kid?” whispered Sousa, once the kid in question was plausibly out of earshot.

Yo-yo, Coulson, and Daisy all answered simultaneously:

“He turns into an alien mind-control sand squid.”

“He becomes the leader of Hydra.”

“He infiltrates our team and double-crosses us.”

Sousa blinked several times and wished – not for the first time – that he had excessively waxy ears, so that he would have a viable alternative explanation when he thought he had heard phrases like ‘alien mind-control sand squid’.

“I’m not unsympathetic,” said Coulson. “He’s a kid and he’s suffering. But he plays a very important role in the Hydra uprising. And it was always _his_ theory that he wouldn’t have done that if he hadn’t gone through-“ Coulson gestured to the basement door, “-this.”

“It’s all about perfectly maintaining the time stream, right?” Sousa waited a moment for the them to recognize the irony of that question being posed by a man who was supposed to have been murdered. “Not about the fact that he double crossed you?”

Daisy held up both hands in a surrender gesture. “I hate him,” she admitted. “That’s not a secret. But I also grew up in the system.” Realizing that Sousa might not know that euphemism, she added, “Foster care, an orphanage. I saw a lot of kids that had terrible things done to them by the people who were supposed to take care of them. And I wouldn’t wish that on anyone. Not even Grant Ward. But he has to lead Hydra, which means he needs to get plucked out of juvie and recruited by John Garret, which means he needs to have such a shitty family that he burns this place down.”

Sousa was busy formalizing an argument that the timestream was already FUBAR and they could hardly call themselves the good guys if they let this go when creaking stairs signaled the boy’s return.

The boy was now wearing basketball shorts and a white tee-shirt with nothing on his feet. His face and hair were lightly wet – he hadn’t taken a shower, but he’d obviously washed up. They were finally able to get a good look at him. He seemed small for twelve, but kids hit puberty at different ages and they knew he would top out over six feet, so height was clearly not a long-term problem. He was thin but not emaciated. His eyes were sunken. He was moving more smoothly now, having shaken out the stiffness of prolonged confinement. In the bright light of the kitchen, they couldn’t miss the swollen red lines that crisscrossed his right hand.

“There’s no reason for SHIELD to be here,” said Grant. “You’re journalists, or cops, or social workers or something.” He folded his arms over his chest. “Everything I say is off the record and I refuse to answer questions without a lawyer.”

Sousa made his way to the sink and filled a glass with water. Then he walked over to the island, which was lined by barstools on either side. “You’re dehydrated,” he said, putting the glass down. “Even if you don’t feel like drinking, you need it.”

Grant took a step toward the island and tipped his head sideways to look up at Sousa. “Are you a doctor?”

“No,” he chuckled, “I don’t have that kind of brains. But I was in the army and they drilled basic first aid into us. If it’s not a tick or dehydration, I can’t help you.” As Grant sat on the barstool and took the glass, Sousa added, “If you can stomach it, eat something salty, too. You have pretzels?”

Grant opened a cabinet and reached up for a box of crackers. The stretch exposed more skin on his arm, neck, and back, revealing mottled bruises and a patch of marker drawing on his bicep.

Sousa sat down across from Grant. He looked back at the other three agents. “Can I have the room?” He wasn’t sure how SHIELD procedure had changed in the intervening decades, but he was fairly confident that human nature hadn’t, and he wasn’t going to have much luck questioning an eighty-pound kid while three armed adults made little or no attempt to hide their ambivalence or outright animosity.

Coulson nodded, shuffled out. They would be right outside, listening in.

“Do you want to tell me how you ended up in that cage?”

“Fifth.”

“What?”

“Fifth amendment. You can’t make me talk.”

“Technically,” said Sousa, hoping that he remembered interrogation laws correctly and that they hadn’t changed too much, “the fifth amendment only applies when you’re accused of a crime.”

“No, it’s whenever things you say might possibly make you sound guiltier. It’s hard to prove something isn’t fifth amendment. You need a judge.” Grant’s maddingly confident tone was undermined as he nibbled at the edge of a cracker.

That…actually sounded correct. Correct-ish anyway. If they were operating within the law, which they very clearly were not. It was more than a little concerning that this kid apparently knew his way around an interrogation, though.

“Where’d you hear all that?”

“My dad’s a politician. He has people over. They talk.” Grant continued drinking small sips of water, swishing each one around his mouth before swallowing.

Non-responses to questioning were so common, Sousa wondered why he ever tried the direct route at all. He knew how to handle them, though. If a guy wouldn’t tell you what he saw on 10th Avenue, you asked him about the bars on 9th, and he’d give you what you wanted eventually. Sousa tried a different tactic. “Who lives here?” he asked.

Grant paused, obviously thinking about whether this information could be used against him. Obviously deciding it was a matter of public record, he ticked off the five residents on his fingers. “Me, my mom, my dad, my older brother Christian, and my younger brother Thomas.”

“And where are they?”

“My dad’s in DC. He’s been there for two weeks, won’t be home until the end of the month. It’s always like that around the budget. Christian’s at sailing camp. He’ll be there all summer. And I don’t know where mom and Thomas are, but probably play practice – _rehearsal_ ,” he corrected himself. “Thomas is in some stupid adult play. He hardly has any lines. He just stands there and acts cute.”

Grant was clearly unaware that he had just given up the identity of the person who had caged him, so Sousa asked another benign question to keep the interview civil. “What’s fam-ib?” he asked, pointing to marker scrawlings of letters above a cluster of wavy lines on the inside of Grant’s left arm, obviously a homemade fake tattoo.

“F-A-M-I-B,” said Grant. “It’s my motto: Fire always makes it better.” He elongated the word ‘always’ and said the rest with a steady rhythm. Probably a line from the radio, then.

“You like to play with fire?”

“Fifth amendment.”

“It’s not a bad thing,” said Sousa. “I knew a guy who liked to play with fire. Named Howard. He was a genius. Invented all kinds of really helpful stuff for the military.”

“I’m not a genius.” Grant’s tone wasn’t self-pitying, just factual.

“Have you ever burned all your hair and your eyebrows off?”

Grant shook his head no.

“Then you’re smarter than he was.”

Grant emitted a twitchy exhalation that was distantly related to a laugh.

Sousa smiled. “You ought to think about becoming a welder,” he said. “They make great money. You’ve got to have steady nerves and you’ve got to like fire.” He wasn’t sure why he said this. It wasn’t at all relevant to his line of questioning, or even to the current decade. 12-year-olds in the 1990s did not worry about their job prospects. This boy was nothing like he had been, growing up in the depression in Idaho, hitching to Boise and enlisting in the army for three meals and a bed more than any sense of patriotism. The boy Sousa had been would have cut off his own leg for work as a welder.

Grant squinted skeptically. “You guys are a rogue band of traveling career counselors?”

“No,” Sousa shook himself free of the reminiscence. “It was just an idea.” Couldn’t hurt for the boy to have a little hope for the future. “We’re really SHIELD” He pulled out his badge and tossed it across the tabletop. The crew on the Zephyr had seen fit to mock up badges for him across every few years of SHIELD’s history, adjusting his birthdate accordingly.

Grant frowned and the apparently authentic ID. “I’m not weird, though. Not X-Files weird, anyway. So why are you here?”

Sousa didn’t know what ‘X-Files weird’ meant, but he assumed it had something to do with SHIELD’s particular brand of crazy. “We were investigating something else and we found you. I don’t know how much we can help, but I couldn’t just leave you there.”

“You won’t help. Nobody ever helps.” Grant rolled his eyes as he spoke, as if this dereliction of public service and human decency were an annoyance.

“What’s that mean?”

Grant put his glass down, now almost empty. “Look, I’m not stupid, okay? I know it’s not normal, the stuff in my family. And besides, I get in trouble sometimes and I can’t explain why I did it.” Grant’s tone was becoming frantic, his emotions shifting rapidly from one pole to the other. “I’ve tried to explain. I’ve tried, okay? I’ve tried to tell people and get help and it never works. It never, ever works and they never, ever help.” He was breathing heavily by the end, though he kept his gasps silent.

They sat in silence for nearly a minute. Sousa knew that he couldn’t promise anything. Grant was equally aware that he had offered the man sitting across from him the opportunity to differentiate himself from prior ineffective adults, and that Sousa had declined to do so.

Sousa broke the silence. “You said you’ve tried before.”

“Yeah. More than once. Like, a few years ago, my mom was pregnant. Then my dad hit her in the stomach and she wasn’t pregnant anymore. I told my teacher and I told a police officer.”

“What happened?”

“I had to go to counseling for, like, a year. To find out why I would make up such a terrible lie. That’s what happened.”

“Have you ever been in that cage before?”

“Yeah,” said Grant, disappointment giving way to apathy, “but not this long. It’s usually just a couple of hours or overnight.”

“Does your dad know your mom puts you in there?”

Grant showed no sign of surprise that Sousa had narrowed down the culprits. “Of course he knows. He’s the one who bought the stupid thing.”

“What happened to your hand?” Sousa pointed to the red marks on Grant’s fingers.

“I tried to get out by breaking the cage. I was rocking it back and forth to knock it over and it smashed my fingers. Didn’t work.”

Sousa winced in sympathy. That must’ve been a low moment for the boy, in pain, pinned by his own weight. “Anything feel broken?”

Grant shook his head no. “Aren’t you going to ask why?”

“Why what?”

“Why she put me in there,” said Grant, as if this were the most obvious question in the world.

“I assumed you’d take the fifth.”

Grant almost smiled. “Yeah,” he said, “yeah I would.”

Sousa stood from his barstool and collected Grant’s empty glass. He refilled it. “Keep drinking,” he said, handing it back to the boy. “Stay here. I’m going to go talk to my colleagues.”

Sousa was a lucky man in a lot of ways. Yes, he’d been born in the depression, but he’d been strong enough to enlist in the army. And sure, he’d lost a leg, but it was only one leg, not two. And he didn’t feel the missing limb burning and aching the way some men did. And okay, he’d been all but murdered, but before that could happen, he got plucked out of time by future people with their magical technology. But he spent most of his life reacting to problems, not leading the way. Even as he had moved up the ranks in SHIELD, he had done so by ably navigating the crises that appeared on his doorstep. He didn’t have the genius of a Howard Stark or the drive of a Peggy Carter. He just had the good-natured persistence of a Daniel Sousa, so he left the kitchen for the living room, where Daisy, Yo-yo, and Coulson were awkwardly perched on uncomfortable furniture. He balanced his cane on a straight-backed chair and rubbed his hands together. “What are we going to do?” he asked, voice pitched low enough not to carry.

“I don’t think there’s anything we can do.” Daisy sounded genuinely apologetic. “We know from the Framework – that was a computer simulation of our lives that was powered by an evil book – that it doesn’t take much to push him off his path. He has to become Hydra, which means he has to grow up with,” she gestured vaguely around herself, “this.”

Sousa opted to blow past the issue of the evil book to focus on the problem at hand. “What happened to make him change in the…other place?”

“He was recruited by Victoria Hand instead of John Garrett,” answered Coulson. “Hand was a good agent. Garrett was a Hydra mole.” He paused to bite the tip of his thumb. “In the real world, Ward murders Hand. Just so you know.”

Sousa pinched the bridge of his nose. There was preserving the timestream, the crimes the kid would grow up to commit, and the abuse being done to the kid right now, not to mention whatever Grant had done to get punished with two and a half days in a dog crate. Oh, and the fact that the kid’s behavior was mercurial, hostile, and strange. There didn’t seem to be a way to solve all of these problems simultaneously.

“When I met him,” said Yo-yo, “he had kidnapped Simmons. And he was torturing her.”

“We can’t hold him responsible for things he hasn’t done yet,” said Coulson. He frowned. “Ward believed that growing up like this made it inevitable that he would end up the way he did.”

“I’m not talking about explaining why he was the way he was,” said Daisy. She sighed. “I think some people have a tougher life with right and wrong and stuff. No one ever offered me the chance to join Hydra when I was homeless and desperate. If they had, I think I wouldn’t have taken it, but I can’t know for sure, maybe I would have. I still think that he could have made different choices before it came time to betray us. He had years to reconsider. And that’s, you know, an ethics thing. But it’s also a timestream thing. If he can make different choices, then we have to make sure he doesn’t.”

“This is the problem with time travel,” said Coulson. “Our notions of right and wrong developed for a linear universe.”

“I don’t know why,” said the boy’s voice, “you think you’re time travelers, but you have to fix my door.”

Even though the voice was coming from the opposite direction, they all looked toward the kitchen before swiveling back toward the entranceway, where Grant was standing. He still looked unsteady, but he wasn’t leaning on anything for support.

“Don’t sneak!” snapped Yo-yo. “It’s rude.”

“Sneaking’s saved my skin a whole bunch of times. I’m good at it. And besides, I just went out the back and around.” Grant folded his arms and addressed the whole group with a sharp scowl. “You broke the front door and you broke the lock on the cage. My mom’s going to notice that and guess who’s going to get blamed.” He looked much less shaky than he had before, almost confident.

Sousa realized with a pang of guilt that – unless his fellow agents had some surprisingly relevant technology – they weren’t going to be able to fix the door before the Zephyr’s time travel engine whirred to life and they were dragged to the next decade. It wasn’t a hard job, but it took materials and time, neither of which they had. 

Coulson held up his hands in a placating gesture. “We’re just trying to understand the situation.”

“What’s there to understand?!” shouted Grant. “My dad gets mad when he’s drunk, which is always. And he takes it out on everybody. So my mom gets mad and she does stuff to me and Christian because we look like dad. But not Thomas because he’s not dad’s son, but nobody’s supposed to know that, but everybody does, which only makes my dad angrier. And then Christian gets mad at Thomas because mom actually loves him so he does stuff to me and Thomas.”

“Who are _you_ mad at?” asked Coulson.

“Everybody!”

“And who do _you_ hurt?” asked Coulson.

Grant looked at the floor, scowling. There were red blotches on his cheeks. “This is stupid. If I leave it up to you, you won’t help at all. Won’t even fix the door. Probably say it’s all my fault. Well, you can all suck it for all I care.” He wasn’t shouting anymore, though his final words were venomous. He reached into the pocket of his shorts and pulled out a bottle of pills. “This is my mom’s Valium. I bet if I take the whole bottle, I can kill myself.”

Yo-yo shifted her weight, preparing to snatch the drugs from the boy’s hands.

“I’m good at sneaking and I’m good at listening,” said Grant. “You think I have to do something in the future when I’m grown up. Well, I can’t do whatever it is if I’m dead.” He sneered at Yo-yo, inching forward. “Go ahead, take the pills. This thing I have to do, it doesn’t sound like something I can take care of while I can still eat off the kids’ menu. So that means I have plenty of time to kill myself. I don’t have to use pills. I’ll ride my bike into town and dive off the roof of the church. I’ll jump in front of a truck. I can probably get a hold of my Dad’s gun. He keeps it locked up, but only in his desk and his desk is made of wood. I could smash it with a hammer. Hell, if I’ve got time to plan, I could probably make it look like Christian killed me. I can screw up my Dad’s re-election while I’m at it. I’ve got options. You don’t.” Grant tossed the medication bottle to Yo-yo. His voice was absolutely cold when he said, “If you guys won’t help me, I will make sure that your plans fail.”


	2. Chapter 2

The four agents were stunned, however briefly. Not just by hearing a child graphically describe his plans for suicide, but by the dispassionate way he had done so. Daisy had convinced Grant to go upstairs and play his GameBoy with headphones on while Coulson trained thermal imaging on him to ensure he complied, during which time Yo-yo explained handheld video game systems to Sousa.

When Grant was finally squared away, out of the room, they all released a breath they hadn’t known they’d been holding.

“Is it strange that I was more in favor of helping him before he tried to force us?” said Yo-yo, arms crossed. “I don’t respond well to threats.”

“Would he really do it?” asked Sousa. He wasn’t a psychologist and he’d never had kids. He didn’t really know what someone that young was capable of.

“That’d be so goddamn Ward,” said Daisy, “to kill himself out of spite.”

“It’s not just spite,” said Coulson. “He must have thought about suicide before today, to reel off all those methods, just like that.”

“He still thinks he’s the hero,” said Daisy. “When he was listing what the people in his family do to each other, he left out that he abuses his little brother. He’ll say his older brother made him do it, but he thinks that having this stuff happen to him means we owe him a free pass on all the-“ she waved her hand to indicate a multi-year rampage of mayhem and murder.

“We can’t think about that right now,” said Coulson. “Because if we find a way to keep the timeline on track, despite his threat, that’s exactly where he’ll end up.”

“I can’t believe we’re being held hostage by a middle schooler,” said Daisy.

“You never should have let him out of that cage.” Yo-yo glared at Sousa.

“I saw a human being treated inhumanely and I-“

“You were right to act,” interrupted Coulson. “It’s hard for the rest of us to put aside what he did – what he’ll do. I was leaning toward helping him before. Only now, I feel manipulated and I don’t want to give into his threat. But that’s not how we make decisions. It’s not about how we got here or whether we like him, it’s about getting the best outcome from where we are right now.”

Sousa rubbed both temples with one hand. “So, to keep him from killing himself and messing up the timeline worse, and because it’s the right thing to do, we have to help this kid, which means moving him off the path he’s currently on. But we have to do it in such a way that he ends up joining Hydra anyway. That sound about right?”

Daisy nodded.

“Okay,” said Sousa, “walk me through his life again. I don’t know what I’m looking for, but there’s got to be a way to solve this.”

Coulson started, summarizing what he knew about Ward’s life prior to SHIELD: a history of familial abuse, military school, arson, incarceration, abduction from prison by John Garrett, and Garrett’s “training” consisting of leaving Ward alone in the Wyoming wilderness for five years – the latter two elements having been unbeknownst to SHIELD until _after_ the HYDRA uprising. Daisy joined in once they talked about Ward’s time in SHIELD – his rescue of Simmons, the murder of Koenig – and his time as the head of Hydra, bringing Daisy to her insane father, killing his parents and burning their house down, taking control of Agent 33, and torturing Mockingbird, leading up to his death on Maveth.

Some ironic bit of Sousa’s brain noted the multiple arsons and wondered whether fire did, in fact, make it better.

He suppressed his many, many questions about space travel, mind control, and alien temples to focus on the problem at hand. Even if meddling in time were not an issue, ameliorating Grant’s external circumstances would be a considerable challenge. The obvious actions – calling the police, going to live with a relative – were not feasible or effective, or the boy would have done them already. His family’s wealth and political influence probably played a role in protecting them from formal consequences, and Grant’s aggressive, dysregulated interpersonal style made him easy to brand as sick and a liar.

Sousa wasn’t sure if there had been laws against child abuse on the books when he was young. From a practical perspective, they certainly hadn’t been enforced unless a child was beaten to death. The cops wouldn’t have wanted to interfere in a man’s private business, his home life. It wasn’t that people thought it was okay – everyone belted their kids in those days, but they knew the difference between a swat on the behind and battery. Since law enforcement was a hair’s breadth away from useless when it came to family violence, people took it on themselves to intervene. Sometimes a neighbor would take the child in. ( _You’d be doing us a favor if you let him stay in our extra room. We need another farmhand. And it’ll be one less mouth to feed, right?_ ) Sometimes the man’s wife would up and leave him, take the kids and no one would stop her. Sometimes the man’s pastor would read him the riot act, or his barkeeper would cut him off. All of that took time, involvement. They were the acts of an invested community. They couldn’t be replicated by short-term visitors without follow-up.

And all of that was only the outside. Sousa had spent less than an hour with Grant Ward and he’d seen paranoia, rage, and hopelessness, not to mention callousness, deceit, impulsivity, and manipulation. He’d even seen the first glimmers of the fundamental error Coulson had described: an inability to understand that the statuses of victim and victimizer were not mutually exclusive. Those were seeds that had been planted deep, that couldn’t be washed away by a few hours’ concern. Was it comforting to think his personality would guide him back onto the timeline’s path? Or depressing to think that he was set on that path by the age of twelve?

It was Yo-yo who finally spoke up, slowly at first before picking up speed. “In Colombia, there are drugs, cartels everywhere. Getting involved in that, it’s…I can understand how it happens. My mother, she used to say that if you could just keep your child safe from joining the cartels or worse, buying from them, until they were sixteen or so, they will probably stay away for their whole life. There’s still all the reasons to join, but when you’re older they can’t…I don’t remember the word…talk to you so you change?”

“Influence?” guessed Daisy.

“That’s it,” said Yo-yo. “Influence. When you’re young, it’s easy to influence you.” She paused and touched the crucifix she wore around her neck. “We’ve been thinking he has to be in a very bad place when he meets Garrett in five or six years. But what if he meets Garrett now? He won’t have so many bad things yet, but he’ll be younger, easier to influence.”

“You’re suggesting we try to get John Garrett to adopt 12-year-old Grant Ward?” Coulson sounded skeptical. Actually, he sounded like he was trying and failing to hide his skepticism. “Even before he kept a teenager isolated in the woods for half a decade, Garrett has never exactly been father material.”

“Maybe not adopt,” said Yo-yo. “Maybe he sends him to that Hydra school where they kept Ruby.”

Hydra _school_?! Sousa barely stifled the interruption.

Yo-yo continued: “Maybe he forges papers and puts him in a group home. Or maybe he does keep him and he’s not a good father, but he’s still better than locking him up like he’s a dog in the pound.”

“Even if he did the same things,” said Daisy, “it’s just not as bad coming from a stranger than when it’s your own family.”

Sousa didn’t know what kind of relationship Daisy had with her parents other than the very few details provided in the description of Grant Ward’s trip to Puerto Rico, but she said she had been fostered, so he assumed she was speaking from experience.

“Agent Sousa?” asked Coulson, “What’s your call?”

“Why is this my decision? I know less about-“

“That’s why it’s your decision,” interrupted Coulson. “You’re the only one of us who doesn’t have a personal grudge.”

Sousa took a breath as he considered the plan. “This Garrett, he kept a kid isolated in the woods for five years. Are you confident that he’s going to be better than what the kid has right now?”

“Yes,” said Coulson.

“Then let’s do it. It’s the best idea we have to keep the timestream intact and it doesn’t require us to put a kid back in a dog cage before his mother gets home.” It felt good to make a decision, even if said decision involved painful compromise.

“All right.” Coulson leaned forward, the way he always did while strategizing. “In five days, John Garrett will be dispatched to Raystown Lake in central Pennsylvania to deal with an infestation of very sharp jellyfish.”

Sousa wondered whether Coulson could have recalled his fellow agents’ missions that readily before being turned into a robot.

“By ‘sharp’, do you mean ‘clever’ or knife-like?” asked Daisy.

“Unfortunately, the latter. There was a mad geneticist. We got those from time to time.” Coulson grabbed a scrap of newspaper and sketched a general map of the northeastern United states. “There’s a train that can get him pretty close, just about 10 miles off. He can walk the rest, camp out until Garrett arrives.”

That wasn’t ideal, but they didn’t have long before the next time jump. And it was workable. The boy could passably rehydrate on the train. And then, with a few basic supplies and skills, the boy would survive long enough to walk up to a SHIELD agent on a mission and ask for domestic asylum. He might have some scrapes and bug bites, but he was going to Pennsylvania, not Siberia.

“All right,” said Sousa. “Agent Johnson, Agent Rodriguez, go pack food. Agent Coulson, see what you can find in the way of gear. Remember,” he looked at all three of them, “he can only carry…maybe fifteen pounds. I’m going go to tell him the plan.”

They all nodded, went their separate ways. Sousa walked up the wide staircase, looking briefly at the photographs on the wall. They were normal enough, though they were all posed, no candid shots. He now had faces to put to Grant’s parents and brothers, although that information wasn’t really useful. At the top of the stairs, he looked to the left and right before heading in the direction of rustling. The boy’s bedroom was quite large, by Sousa’s standards, and he didn’t share it with his siblings, judging by the sole twin bed. There was a dresser, desk, nightstand, and an enormous misshapen blob that the boy was sitting on, holding a plastic rectangle over his face like a book. Sousa knocked on the open door.

The boy startled and spun around, ripping off his headphones. He scrambled to his feet and was clearly trying to look tough as he asked, “What did you decide? Are you going to help me, or do I have to ruin your future?”

Sousa used his cane to point at the desk chair. “Mind if I sit down?” 

Grant glared, but he didn’t say no, so Sousa took a seat.

“We have a plan to help you,” said Sousa immediately – he wasn’t trying to build suspense. “If you want, we can send you to live with a SHIELD agent. I don’t know him. Honestly, I’ve heard he’s not a very nice guy. But if you’ve got to pick where you’re going to tread water until you turn eighteen, it’s seems like he’s the better bet.”

Grant seemed smaller than he was a minute ago, shoulders sagging and chest angling inward. “You’re going to help me?”

“Yeah,” said Sousa, “yeah, of course.” He wondered if Grant regretted making his threat because now he had no opportunity to find out if they would have helped him of their own volition. Well, that was above Sousa’s pay grade. He was no psychiatrist. He wasn’t going to figure out this kid’s mental problems; he could barely do anything about the physical ones.

“Why can’t I go with you?”

“Because you have to stay in your own timeline.”

Grant clearly thought that was a made-up excuse, but he seemed to accept that he wasn’t going to get very far by arguing it. “And Thomas?”

Coulson had explained Grant’s fraught relationship with his younger brother, and Sousa had picked up a bit from the kid himself. “No,” he said, “just you.” The Ward family probably mistreated its youngest son too, but not as badly, and they had to keep their timestream meddling to a passable minimum. And, he thought with a pang of guilt, if Grant ran away with his younger brother, there was no telling if he’d still become the leader of Hydra. It felt wrong to steer him in that direction, even knowing it was where he would naturally end up.

“What are you going to tell my parents?”

“Me? Nothing. From what you’ve said, they’re good at pulling one over on law enforcement. I guess they’ll do that again.”

“Why aren’t you asking what I did?”

“Did you kill someone?”

Grant shook his head.

“Did you rape someone?”

As soon as the words were out of his mouth, Sousa wondered if he had crossed some sort of line by asking a preteen about sex crimes, but Grant just shook his head.

“Did you sell secrets to the Russians?”

Grant shook his head.

“Then you didn’t deserve what was done to you. You can’t treat an animal that way, let alone a person.”

They were both silent for nearly a full minute. Then, while he played with his fingers, Grant said, “I have this tree I climb. There’s – it’s not really a treehouse, it’s just some boards I nailed in so I’d have someplace to sit. But I like it. I made Thomas go up there with me.”

“Made him?”

“He’s scared of heights. So, when we got up there, he was all afraid and he started crying. I wanted him to stop crying, so I pushed him.” Grant frowned. “It was an accident. I didn’t mean for him to fall and I didn’t mean for him to break his arm.”

“You wanted him to stop crying, so you pushed him,” echoed Sousa. “How’s that work?”

“I wasn’t- It was an accident!” hissed Grant, hints of panic in his eyes. “You’re not telling it right. You’re making me sound like the bad guy!” He squeezed his eyes shut. “I’m not the bad guy,” he whispered, almost to himself.

Suddenly, Sousa could understand the others’ hesitation to help, to strengthen Grant Ward. Because all the things they had said about him, those were in the future and Sousa couldn’t force himself to presume fate was fixed. But what Grant had done to his younger brother was remarkably cruel. Even if the fall had been an accident, Grant readily admitted he had dragged his little brother who was afraid of heights up a tree, then gotten angry with him for being scared. Maybe Grant had panicked, unsure how to soothe his younger brother. Maybe he had become agitated, distressed by what he was seeing and lashing out at the source of the distress, like a dog biting the vet. Maybe the whole thing was planned, done just to torment. But none of those were remotely innocent.

Sousa took a deep breath, rubbed the bridge of his nose and reminded himself of his earlier ideological fervor. Grant was still a child, even if he was the sort of child who gave other children nightmares, who played with fire, and would have – in Sousa’s day – been sent to a boys’ home for the emotionally disturbed. He was a child who was being grotesquely maltreated. Maybe changing that would change the course of his life. Maybe it wouldn’t. It was still the right thing to do.

Finally, he said, “I don’t believe in good people and bad people. Just people who do good things and people who do bad things. If you do a bad thing, you fix it if you can and you try to do better next time.”

Grant exhaled slowly and straightened. “How do I find this SHIELD guy?”

* * *

It was unnerving, how quickly Grant agreed to their plan. Sousa’s own relationship with his parents had been good – with the exception of the summer when he was fourteen, and neither his mother nor his father seemed to share his opinion that getting rejected by Maria DiAngelo was a life-shattering catastrophe – so couldn’t exactly sympathize with the boy’s circumstances. But still, he found it hard to imagine ever being so detached that he agreed to run away, never see his family again, and live with an unapproved stranger after only a few moments of deliberation. Then again, Sousa wondered whether he would see the boy’s psyche as so strikingly maladjusted had he not learned about all the torture and murder that were in his future.

“Say it back to me,” said Sousa.

“I’m taking the train to Huntingdon station. If anyone asks, I’m not supposed to talk to stranger. If they ask again, I’m going to visit my grandmother.”

The ‘strangers’ bit sounded odd to Sousa, but Coulson and Daisy swore by it.

“My ‘grandma’,” Grant held up two fingers on each hand, bending and extending them as he said the word, “lives in Mill Creek but she doesn’t drive so her friend is picking me up. When I get there, it’ll be after midnight. I hide in the bathroom until morning. I go straight south until I see the lake, then I turn left and follow the lake shore. It’s curvy so I’ll go lots of directions. I keep going along until I get to a long, skinny piece of land that’s just across the lake from the boat launch, then hide until fish attack people.”

“What’s the most important rule?”

“Go to bed with me and my clothes dry.” Hypothermia was a risk even in summer, and damp clothes were the main cause.

“Do you make a fire?”

“No.” They didn’t have enough time to go over campfire safety with the kid and his ‘FAMIB’ motto didn’t exactly promise a rational, restrained approach to the subject. He didn’t need a fire. He could sleep when it was dark out.

“Where do you sleep?”

“I tie the tarp to trees so it’s tight and sleep under it.”

“What do you eat?”

“What I brought with me. I won’t eat any mushrooms or try to catch anything.” Grant had been overly confident about his ability to catch, debone, and cook a fish. Given that he believed he could catch a fish with sewing thread and a bent paperclip, any attempt at hunting for his dinner was more likely to worsen his circumstances than better them.

“What about water?”

“On the train, I drink at least two whole water bottles. Then, from the lake. I put the washcloth over the top of the bottle so it filters out the dirt. Then, I add three drops of bleach, shake it really good, and wait a while.”

“What do you say when you see Agent Garrett?”

“The tailor couldn’t fix my argyle sweater.” Grant pursed his lips. “What’s argyle?” he asked.

“It’s big diamonds with lines through them.” Sousa shook his head. “It doesn’t matter what it means. It just matters that you say it exactly.”

“The tailor couldn’t fix my argyle sweater,” repeated Grant.

“I’m going to write a SHIELD code on your shoulder. That’s where it’s least likely to rub off. But if it does, you still have that sentence.” Sousa gestured upward with both hands, indicating that Grant should take his shirt off. The code came from Coulson’s eidetic memory. It was long enough that the print would have to be relatively small, so the boy couldn’t write it on himself. And it couldn’t be on paper, because losing it would be disastrous.

Grant looked around the room with an almost guilty look on his face before removing his shirt. Immediately apparent were purple and yellow blotches on his ribs and belly. One began just above his waistline and clearly extended into his trousers. There was a thick rope of a scar on his left bicep – Sousa couldn’t begin to guess what had made it – and several burns, each no bigger than a matchhead, stretching down below his armpit. Almost hypnotized, Sousa put his hands on Grant’s shoulders and turned him around. There were many thin white vertical lines, fainter, but unambiguous if you stopped to look. Coulson had explained that future medical technology could effectively remove scars and they SHIELD often used this on their undercover agents, so they’d be less memorable, so at least Grant wouldn’t look like this as an adult.

Sousa realized he was gaping, open-mouthed. This certainly wasn’t the most damaged body he’d seen, or even the youngest assault victim, but his cases had usually involved cutting-edge technology, literal monsters, or at least international conflict, not…this. He turned Grant back around and printed Coulson’s signal code to Garrett. As he did so, he noticed there were red blotches on Grant’s neck and cheeks that Sousa first took for yet another injury. But no, they were signs of embarrassment.

“You’re all set,” he said, handing the boy back his shirt.

Grant took it and redressed quickly. “Are you really from the future?”

“No,” said Sousa, “I’m from the past. The other three are from the future.”

“So you don’t know if I’m really a bad guy in the future.”

“I’m sticking with right now.”

“Are you going to tell them what I did?”

Sousa leaned back in his chair. “Why’d you do it? Sounds like your little brother is the one person who doesn’t hurt you, so why would you hurt him?”

Grant shrugged, but he didn’t look indifferent. “He’s my half-brother.”

“You said that. You said your mom loves him because of it. Is that what makes you mad at him?”

“No, that’s what makes Christian mad. It makes me…” Grant looked upwards, searching for the word. “Jealous. Because part of him is good.” He didn’t add, “ _and none of me is,_ ” because he didn’t have to.

“Listen to me,” said Sousa, “what we’re doing, where you’re going…it’s going to be hard. And that’s not because of what you did or who you are or what you deserve. Just like I think you know that what you did wasn’t what your little brother deserved. You’re going to have to grow up fast – faster – and make your own decisions about what’s right and wrong. And sometimes what you feel like doing isn’t what you need to do.” Sousa picked the marker pen back up. “Give me your hand.”

Grant complied, but stretched his neck backward, as if trying to distance as much of himself as possible.

Sousa drew a water droplet and the letters F C F E.

“What’s that mean?”

“Fire can’t fix everything.”

* * *

They gathered on the front steps, Grant wearing the backpack the agents had prepared for him. It clocked in at 14.6 pounds and contained the absolute minimum needed for a 12-year-old child to not die in the Pennsylvania woods. They had cheated, very slightly, by giving him a SHIELD-issue LED flashlight. Those existed in the ‘90s; they just weren’t common. The civilian models were too heavy and dim.

The boy patted his side pocket, where his GameBoy was. “Can I go back and get batteries? For when these run out?”

Coulson glanced at his watch, which gave a countdown to when they were due back at the Zephyr. “Ok.”

The boy dropped the backpack and went around to the side of the garage, where he apparently had a spare key. The agents could hear some rustling and clanking from the garage before Grant’s footsteps could be heard from inside the house. They exchanged glances.

“He’s setting the house on fire, isn’t he?” asked Daisy.

Coulson squinted. Or rather, he appeared to squint while using robotic thermal imaging. “Yes,” he said, “yes, he is.”

“Are we going to…” Yo-yo gestured at the front door.

Sousa wasn’t sure how they would go about putting out a house fire with only a garden hose, but before he could ask about future firefighting technology, Grant re-emerged from the front door, smelling faintly of gasoline.

“I had to leave a note,” he said. “I’m ready to go.”


	3. Chapter 3

“I don’t feel right about any of this,” said Sousa, back on the Zephyr.

“You’re not the only one,” said Daisy. “But it was a hard call and you did what you had to do.” She opened one of the ship’s seemingly endless cabinets and retrieved a bottle. “Liquor hasn’t changed much since your era,” she said, wiggling it back and forth.

“That’s not an endorsement,” answered Sousa. But he grabbed the bottle and followed her. All gin was bad gin, but bad gin was better than no gin.

It took them longer to defeat the Chronicoms. It was impossible to say whether days, weeks, or months passed, and the total was probably different for each crew member, but time passed and in each touchdown, they had to make difficult choices. When they finally returned to their own time, they were all preoccupied with the millions of little changes: To denote delay, Macs had a dragon chasing its tail instead of the spinning ball icon; the Jacksonville Wildcats were dominating the NFL; and people freaking _loved_ popsicles. There were almost as many popsicle stands as coffeeshops. There were high-end flavors like pickle, pesto, and lavender that went for ten, twenty, fifty dollars apiece. There were hipsters buying vintage freezer pops on GregsList since they couldn’t be sent through the mail. There were popsicle bars selling frozen wine and cocktails.

Deke wasn’t particularly bothered. He’d only had a year to learn about modern Earth culture, so he wasn’t all that attached to it. And besides, he made a lot of money investing heavily in _ZimaPops._

Sousa wasn’t aware of the differences at all. He had to consciously remind himself that Mack’s complaint that MC Slammer wasn’t supposed to sweep the National Music Awards with his hit single _(Keep Yo) Hands to Yo Self_ was legitimate, that there was another way the world was actually supposed to be.

But there was one change that none of them could ignore: There had been no Hydra uprising. Or rather, there had been a few insurrections, but no massive upheaval. Sousa privately cheered – maybe they had helped that boy after all – but no, as he understood it, in the original timeline, Ward was a foot-soldier in the Hydra uprising, only fully coming to power afterward. So, if he were better this time around and stayed out of Hydra, that should make Hydra fall apart after their revolution, not before.

It took them a long time to find Ward, to piece together what had happened. He was living off the grid, on a barren tract of land in Wyoming, deeded to Garrett Johnson.

“He’s never been a very creative man,” said Simmons, rolling her eyes, “in any timeline.”

“Do you want to come with us?” Daisy inclined her head toward the Quinjet dock. “It’s kind of an experiment, right?”

“An experiment that lacks controlled conditions is hardly-“ Simmons cut herself off, obviously realizing that Daisy was teasing, not offering up valid data. “I’ll trust in your observations, Agents Johnson,” she said with a smile. Not exactly a real one, but real enough.

“Do you want backup?” asked Coulson.

Daisy shook her head. “If I have to, I’ll quake his ass.”

Daisy and Sousa climbed into the Quinjet. Daisy, because she was the one who most felt she had to know, and Sousa, because he was arguably the person Grant Ward was most likely to have positive memories of. Besides, this gave Sousa the opportunity to start learning to pilot the Quinjet. They thought about landing a few miles away and hiking up to the site, but Ward had already been exposed to time travelers. A modestly high-tech plane wasn’t going to blow his mind.

The aft bay ramp extended downward slowly enough that by the time it hit the dusty, dry grass, a skinny brown dog was barking at the pistons.

“Ears!” shouted a man’s voice. “Get back here! _Ears!_ I swear to god!”

“Ears?” asked Daisy. The dog, hearing his own name, looked up at her and made a valiant attempt to jump onto the ramp from the side. As he tumbled back to the ground, Daisy could see hands grabbing him, lifting him up.

“No! You come when I call you!” An audible sigh. “You’re going to pick a fight with a mountain lion one day.” The dog returned to the ground and resumed investigating the Quinjet’s smells. “Who sent you?”

Sousa decided this side-by-side conversation technique was getting old and he strode down the ramp, allowing some part of his mind to enjoy the ease of walking with two functional legs. “Do you remember me?” he asked, as Grant Ward came into view. He was tall, tanned, with short black hair and thin, wiry stubble. And he had, Sousa could now see, two dogs: an obedient one who heeled at his master’s feet and the other, who was presently eating a small rock, spitting it out, and eating it again.

Ward squinted at the newcomer, clearly unsure until Daisy followed Sousa out of the jet. “Hm,” he said, with utterly insufficient enthusiasm, “you really were time travelers.” It wasn’t until Ward took a step forward that Sousa could see his rather obvious limp. His right leg was shorter than the left, and appeared to be slightly bowed. “You have a habit of breaking into my home,” he added, less annoyed than he ought to have been. “Well, I don’t have chairs for three people.” Without any further discussion, he turned and began walking back to his campsite, dogs following behind.

The campsite was elaborate. There were rain barrels hoisted atop piles of stones, each equipped with a large tarp forming a funnel. Beneath the shadows of the tarps was cordwood which had, judging by the nearby axe, been chopped by Ward himself. There were lines for drying clothes, tanning animal hides, and smoking jerky. There were separate spaces for food storage, cooking, sleeping, and waste. There was a stick frame, perhaps six feet cubed, covered with mosquito netting. It was clearly meant to be portable, as a bug-free place to work or sleep. Currently, it housed a small pile of antlers. Under the smell of woodsmoke, there was an acrid, rank stench, like skunk spray. There was a dugout cabin. Sousa couldn’t tell how big it was just by looking at the exposed portion, but he suspected it was big enough for Ward and his dogs, and no larger. There was a hand crank radio with tiny solar panels on top. On the other side of the site was a pickup truck with a fair amount of gear in the back. And, true to Ward’s word, there was exactly one chair, arranged a few feet away from the fire pit.

Ward grabbed a piece of jerky and sat down, breaking off tiny pieces of it and feeding them to the unfocused dog. “Ears,” he said, “come here.” When the dog complied, he was given a bite of venison.

“You named your dog _Ears_?” asked Daisy. It was a reasonable question, but perhaps not the most important one. “What’s the other one’s name? Eyes?”

“Belly,” said Ward. On hearing her name, Belly got up from her resting place near the rain barrels and trotted over to Ward. “Yes, you’re good too,” he told the dog, feeding her some jerky. “Why are you here?” asked Ward, without ever looking back at the interlopers.

“We want to understand the effect that…what we did…had on your life.” Sousa exchanged glances with Daisy. There really was no place else to sit, but Ward seemed to be allowing them to stay, so he dropped to the ground and Daisy followed suit.

“Not sure how I would know…” Ward trailed off, looking at the jerky in his hand.

It was Daisy who figured it out first: “Are you _high_?”

Ward laughed. It wasn’t a happy laugh, but neither was it forced. “Yeah,” he said, “just pot, but pretty strong.”

“Great,” she sighed. “We come all the way out here and you’re stoned off your ass.”

“I’m not _that_ high. Just…relaxed.”

Sousa decided to get refocus the conversation. “You live here?” he asked. “Full time or just temporarily?”

“Full time,” said Ward.

“Just you and your dogs?” asked Sousa. There was no sign of another human, but it was worth asking.

“Yep. Belly is getting old. In a year or two she won’t be able to hunt, so I’ve started training Ears.”

Sousa shot Daisy a look to prevent her from asking Ward about his singularly uninspired dog names. “You remember us, from that day at your parents’ house?”

Ward nodded.

"Did it work?” asked Daisy. “Did you end up going to live with Garrett?"

"Yeah. Lived with him on and off for almost a decade."

"On and off?" asked Sousa.

"He was still an agent. For the first couple of years, when he was off on a mission, he'd leave me with a junior agent. Couldn't trust me."

"You were already a preteen runaway,” Daisy pointed out. “What kind of trouble did he think you were going to get into?"

"Well, I had a nasty habit of burning down houses, so that was on the list. But mainly he wanted to keep me from running back to Massachusetts."

"Why would you ever want to go back there?" Sousa himself felt cold and tense at the thought of that house, and he hadn’t been forced to live in it.

Ward shrugged. "I was angry, young, stupid. Hell, maybe I missed them. He had to tackle me a couple of times to keep me from running off." Ward seemed to read disapproval in Daisy's expression. "Not like that. Just...protecting me from myself."

"So, he foisted you off on other agents,” concluded Daisy.

"Sort of. I stopped having a normal life. I'm pretty sure I was legally dead. I didn't go to school. I wasn't expecting someone to make me dinner. I learned to take care of myself. If Garrett was there, we would hang out together. He would teach me stuff. And if he wasn't there...well, sometimes the other agents would try to do family stuff. That went badly. So, he switched over to asking guys who were more hands off. That turned into agents who were just supposed to check on me once or twice and that turned into nothing. Besides, I got to go with him sometimes. Not on actual missions, but if he was posted somewhere safe for an extended time, I'd go along. He spent nine months in Prague when I was sixteen. That was great. Lots of daytrips and backpacking around Europe."

Stoner Ward was apparently talkative. "You’re telling me you got to have the world's longest summer vacation," said Sousa, prompting him to continue.

"No. He trained me hard. Weapons, hand-to-hand, history, geography, languages. A lot of wilderness camping. We spent almost a month orienteering in Alaska, once. That was great."

“The Ward I know,” said Daisy, “described Garrett very differently: as a guy who helped him out once, but tricked him, used him.”

Ward leaned back in his chair. Ears took this as a signal to nudge the man for pets, which were provided. “John liked to talk about fallacies – mistakes people made in their thinking that led their ops to fail. Like it was a fallacy to think a terrified civilian was going to act rationally. I don’t know if it was a real part of SHIELD training or just his personal opinion, but it always made sense to me. Anyways, one of his favorites was the personality fallacy, the idea that you could predict what someone was going to do by the kind of person that they were. It’s not that personality doesn’t matter, it’s just that situation matters too. It’s easy to think that brave people do brave things and nice people do nice things. But everybody’s brave sometimes, and everyone’s a coward if you put them in the right situation.”

“That sounds like an excuse to me,” said Daisy. “I know people who have been kind and honorable every time.”

Grant shrugged. “Maybe you see them in the same kinds of situations over and over.”

“So what, Garrett was a totally different guy because he met you a few years earlier?” Daisy was skeptical.

“I don’t know. I don’t know what the other Garrett was like. It was just an idea.”

* * *

_Enoch tipped his head to one side, not unlike a puppy. “Mr. Ward’s so-called ‘personality fallacy’ is consistent with my observation of human behavior. People’s behavior is highly situational, and humans are remarkably unaware of this fact.”_

_“But the situations weren’t that different,” argued Daisy._

_“In the original timeline, Garrett sought out a 17-year-old Grant Ward, who had already been convicted of a felony. He extracted him under conditions of secrecy with no societal oversight. In the amended timeline, an abused 12-year-old Grant Ward sought out John Garrett in a semi-public fashion. Those are…not insignificant distinctions.”_

* * *

“Where’s Garrett now?” asked Sousa.

“Dead,” said Ward. “I killed him.”

“Good. Great. I’m glad to know that no matter the timeline, Grant Ward is still a murderer.” Daisy scowled.

“Manslaughter,” said Ward, “technically.”

“Excuse me?” asked Sousa.

“It was never brought before a court, but it would have been manslaughter, not murder. I meant to hit him, but I didn’t mean to kill him. That’s manslaughter.”

“And why did you hit him?” Sousa didn’t like the fact that he was sitting below the man he was interrogating. It made him feel like a child arguing with an adult.

Grant looked to the side. An observer could be forgiven to think he was watching his dogs, but he wasn’t. “It’s over. He helped me. A lot. And then he asked me to do something I just couldn’t do. It was bad enough when it happened. But he’s dead and I don’t want to drag his name through the mud.”

Daisy had no patience for Ward’s dramatics. “We already know he was Hydra.”

“He wasn’t-“ snapped Ward, cutting himself off. “He was…he worked for Hydra. I don’t think he believed in it, but maybe that doesn’t matter. He never told me, all those years. Just said things about loyalty and justice and fixing a fucked up world. And then it was time for me to apply to SHIELD Operations Academy. But it was right after 9/11 and there were a ton of applications. That was okay. I needed the time. So it was two years after that when I got accepted. He gave me the letter. And then he told me what he expected of me.”

“And you just stood up to him?” asked Daisy, incredulous. “Just like that? The other you couldn’t stop going on about how he had no choice but to obey Garrett.”

“I don’t know what the hell the other me did and I sure as fuck don’t know why. All I know is that I didn’t want to do it. I said some things. He said some things. He didn’t say that he couldn’t let me go now that I knew his secret, not if I wasn’t going to play along. But he didn’t have to. I don’t think it ever occurred to him that I would say no. And then…” Ward looked down. “We sometimes settled things by sparring. We got rough. He had inorganic parts. They kept him alive after an injury. They broke sometimes. I helped fix them. I hit him and it was just,” gulp, “the wrong,” deep, quick breath, “timing, the wrong angle, the wrong target. I don’t know. He went into cardiac arrest and I couldn’t bring him back.”

“No,” Daisy shook her head. “There has to be a reason.”

“I don’t know what you want from me,” rumbled Ward, narrowly avoiding a growl. “How the hell should I know what motivated a fictional man who happens to share my DNA? Do you go around interrogating identical twins?”

“Forget him!” shouted Daisy. “How did _you_ decide you didn’t want to be in Hydra? What made you-“

“Why do you care? I’m telling you how I killed the only real father I ever had! That’s what matters!”

Daisy looked…mollified would be going too far, but her intensity was dialed back at least. “All right. You hit him. He died. What happened next?”

“SHIELD investigated. I told the truth. They didn’t believe me – about the Hydra part anyway. Or maybe someone did and someone didn’t. I’ll never be sure. All I know is the compromise they reached: rule his death an accident, which means I wasn’t liable, but rescind my admission to SHIELD academy. Some agent, a woman with a bright red streak in her hair, gave me the news. She said wounds would be too fresh for all the people who knew John. She offered to make me IDs so I could apply to some other agency, enlist in the military, whatever.”

“You turned her down?” asked Sousa. He was not sitting in the living quarters of a man who had proper identification.

“They didn’t believe me about Hydra. Said I must have misunderstood.” Ward bit his lower lip. “If you pay a lot for something, it feels like it’s worth a lot. Saying no to John, it was just an impulse. But after I sacrificed his life to stay out of Hydra, it was the only thing that mattered in the world.”

“What was?” Not for the first time, Daisy wished Ward were a better storyteller.

“Taking down Hydra. Those bastards took the only person who ever gave a damn about me. I started hunting them. John was good but he still left a few clues. And besides, he had been training me since I was twelve. Pretty soon, a SHIELD agent started leaving me intel and supplies.”

Sousa noticed how, in the span of less than a minute, Ward had switched from admitting his role in John Garrett’s death and admitting Garrett’s allegiance to Hydra, to describing Hydra as “taking” Garrett from him.

“An agent?” asked Daisy. “Who?”

“I didn’t know at first. We just passed intel back and forth. But we met eventually. Tall woman. Attractive, actually. Half the time she’d send her sometimes-ex-husband instead. He was a royal pain in the ass.”

“You’re speaking in the past tense,” noted Sousa.

“Leads started running dry about five years ago. And then I broke my leg.”

“In a mighty struggle with a fascist militant?” Daisy managed to sound slightly sincere.

“Slipped climbing down an icy ladder.” Grant shrugged. “In fairness, I had been on the room to assassinate a fascist militant. But I was just climbing down with my gear. I tried to set it, stay off of it while it healed, but whatever I didn’t wasn’t enough and it came back together wrong.”

“Why didn’t you go to a hospital?” asked Sousa.

Grant scoffed. “I can’t just walk into the emergency room.”

“Clearly not.” Sousa scoffed right back. “You can barely hobble.”

“I can’t because I’m _wanted_. I’ve killed forty-seven people.” He paused, let that sink in. “So I’m stuck with this.” He gestured to his leg. “Morse knows how to contact me if she needs a stationary sniper, but aside from that, I’m out of the game.”

Daisy rolled her eyes disbelievingly. “And now you just hunt ducks with your dogs and get high?”

“I do other stuff.” Ward sounded a little defensive, or maybe just annoyed. “There’s a guy about twelve miles south of here who lets me fill up my rain barrels from his irrigation tap when it’s dry. In return, I help him out with coyotes that harass his cattle from time to time. I read. I can usually get baseball on the radio. I collect shed antlers, tan hides, that sort of thing. Sell them in town. I have to keep on top of fuel, obviously. I fish a little. I’ve been doing more of that. I got a book of those sudokus but I’m not very good at them.”

“And that’s it?” asked Sousa. “That’s your life?”

For a moment, Ward almost looked sad. But that moment passed, and the empty, stoned look returned. “I’ve killed forty-seven people: forty-six Hydra agents and John Ga-. I’ve killed forty-seven Hydra agents. They weren’t all getting ready to blow up a dam or put poison in the water supply. Some of them were at home watching television. One of them was at a baptism, outside, having a cigarette. Once, the target’s kid was there.”

“You want me to believe you feel guilty?” asked Daisy.

“No. I’m telling you that I don’t. At all. Those years with John, I started to feel…normal. We’d go to the batting cages. He’d let me drink half a beer. I got my GED and he was proud of me. But what I was really learning was how to fake it. I might think it’s too bad that they died, but I don’t feel bad about killing them. I don’t think I’ve ever felt guilty about anything. So I stay up here with my drugs and my dogs.” That look, that almost sad look passed over him again. “Every once in a while, I go check in on my younger brother. From a distance. Just to make sure he’s okay.”

“Sounds like you care about him,” said Sousa.

“I was looking for someone else to kill. If someone messed with him, I’d have a reason. But he got out. He keeps to himself. A girlfriend broke his heart, but just in the normal relationship way. That’s not a reason.”

“This is you on weed?” Daisy was incredulous. “God, stay the hell away from ketamine.”

Ward laughed again, that same joyless spasm.

Sousa didn’t think the situation was very funny. According to the others, the original Ward has been very serious and severe. This Ward was relaxed enough to take drugs, but he was completely detached from society, from human relationships. His motive for resisting Hydra didn’t seem to be a refutation of their actions or their philosophy, but rather revenge for the death of John Garrett, or even worse, because he felt the need to kill someone anyway and needed a target. They had the worst of both worlds: They hadn’t preserved the timeline and Ward was still…something. Sousa didn’t have a word for what Ward was. Whatever was broken in him, fire sure as hell wasn’t enough to make it better.

“Is this,” Sousa gestured to the campsite around them, “what you want to do with the rest of your life?”

Ward got up and hobbled over to his dogs. Ears was pestering Belly, demanding the older dog play. Ward picked up Ears and carried him back to the chair.

“I remember you,” said Ward. “I don’t just remember that day in a general sense. I remembered you. I remember you broke the lock on the crate. I remember you wrote a code on me. And I remember you saying that you didn’t believe in good people and bad people, just good acts and bad acts. Well, I’ve done a lot of good acts. I killed the bad guys. But I’m still the same rotten person I always was. Doesn’t seem like enough, does it?” His tone was angry, challenging.

Sousa had nothing to say because – holy hell – it did not seem like enough. He had meant what said to that boy (subjectively) a few days prior. He didn’t think anyone had good or evil built into their bones, but Ward was right. The man had spent his life single-mindedly hunting Hydra agents, and Sousa was judging him because he didn’t feel guilty enough when he did it? Except, yeah, Sousa was definitely judging that. He had served in World War II. He’d known occasional soldiers who seemed downright gleeful at the sight of Nazi blood and he had judged them for it.

“Does your leg hurt?” asked Sousa.

“I don’t think about it.”

“That’s a yes.” Sousa paused. “We could fix it for you.”

Daisy’s foot arched in a way that clearly indicated she would have been kicking Sousa under the table, had her legs been free and under a table.

“They fixed yours,” said Ward. “You walk differently.”

“They replaced it, really. Swapped out a clunky old prosthetic for a high-tech, robotic…I don’t get it. I just know it works.”

“This isn’t that simple. The bone grew wrong.”

“I believe that a lot of things can be fixed,” said Sousa.

Ward broke off another piece of jerky and whistled. Both dogs came running for their reward.

“You…must know a lot about Hydra,” said Daisy. “The names and bios of the people you killed. Their roles, their contacts.” She paused for confirmation.

Ward nodded.

“Could we come back and consult with you?” she asked. When Ward didn’t immediately respond, she added, “We could bring some supplies you can’t get out here. Pizza? Beer?”

“Shrimp fried rice,” said Ward. “Bring me shrimp fried rice and I’ll tell you what you want to know.”

**Author's Note:**

> My goal was to write a Grant Ward that was not just a victim, one who is genuinely aggressive and destructive, but in a way that suggests there's some hope that he could develop the ability to take responsibility and demonstrate self-control. He's only twelve, after all. :)


End file.
